The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta.
In an interview featured on the Criterion edition DVD, Schlöndorff himself recognizes post‑9/11 USA in his adaptation of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. It’s not hard. At the height of Baader-Meinhof hysteria, young Germans affixed stickers reading “Ich gehore nicht zur Baader-Meinhof Gruppe” to their cars to avoid police harassment, just as Sikh and Muslim cabbies draped their taxis in the Stars ‘n’ Stripes to demonstrate their patriotism.
When Katharina Blum finds herself the victim of a political intrigue involving an activist on the lam, she’s a political naif who’s hardworking and discreet about her private affairs. Once implicated, her life is torn apart by a police-state feverishly pursuing all leads at any cost, and a tabloid media doggedly feasting on the scraps. As Blum struggles to preserve her dignity, her radicalization is immediate and total and it galvanizes her against what’s to come.
An outstanding example of both social isolation and psychological torment, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum remains a testament to the state-sponsored paranoia that characterized the aftermath of the New Left.
Schlöndorff and von Trotta, like author and Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, were tainted as spiritual godparents of Baader-Meinhof. They were all avowed pacifists.